On 12/08/2010 11:54, Tim Golden wrote:
On 12/08/2010 11:40, Michael Foord wrote:
User editable configuration files are very different from libraries. The
per user site-packages folder *should* be hidden somewhere out of the
way where you can get at them if you want them but won't stumble across
them all the time. e.g. AppData on Windows.
For files we expect the user to be able to edit we shouldn't go out of
our way to make them hard or inconvenient to find.
This really comes down -- as with the Mac discussion last week, I
think -- to the tension between standard file locations and
easy-to-get-to.
The difference on Windows, though, is that while on Mac it's either:
Apple standard /This/That/TheOther vs Unix standard $HOME/.something
on Windows it's %APPDATA%\myprog vs whatever-I-thought-of-at-the-time.
APPDATA isn't actually that hard to get to on any version of Windows
post 2000. (Just stick %APPDATA% into any Explorer window -- even
IE, for goodness sake). Even from the command line it's not hard:
notepad "%APPDATA%\python\python26\idle.ini"
Ultimately, as a Windows user/developer, I'd vote for a memorable
consistency, which for me would be %APPDATA%\python\... If everything's
in one place, I'll just create a shortcut / hardlink / whatever to get
me there when I want to change things.
How is ~/python not memorable or consistent? (And cross-platform
memorability and consistency is valuable too.)
Another issue is discoverability. Many users won't know about these
config files unless they *see* them. Sure if you *know* where they are
then editing them is easy - but how often as a user do you browse your
AppData folder? (As a windows user the only times I went delving in this
mysterious location was trying to diagnose obscure errors.)
I'm not aware of any consistent pattern of putting *user editable* files
in AppData, and I doubt this is where most users would look for them. In
fact for Windows the *correct* thing to do is probably to use the
registry and then provide a graphical tool for editing the values. If
you're arguing for consistency why not argue for this? If we were to
provide native GUI tools for editing values then the location suggested
by Ronald for the Mac (which is the standard location for preferences
files maintained by GUI tools) would also be the right location.
All the best,
Michael
TJG
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